How The Telegraph identified the Hillsborough Wikipedia vandal

Oliver Duggan explains how the civil servant who posted abusive
comments on the online encyclopedia was tracked down, questioned and
eventually dimissed for gross misconduct

Two boys pay their respects at the Media Wall outside Lime Street Station in Liverpool, which remembers the 96 football supporters who lost their lives in the Hillsborough disasterPhoto: MERCURY PRESS AND MEDIA

Insulting edits to the Hillsborough section of Wikipedia were posted by a civil servant logged in the Government’s Secure Intranet (GSI) in May 2012. Two years later, The Telegraph discovered who did it.

The abusive comments were found originally in the publicly-available edit logs of the online encyclopedia, among thousands of mostly helpful changes made to pages relating to the 1989 tragedy.

Such vandalism is common on the site, posted mostly on controversial topics and enjoying a short moment of notoriety before disappearing into the website's archive.

In April, the Liverpool Echo became aware of a spatter of edits made between 2.10pm and 2.15pm on May 22, a Tuesday, to the Wikipedia page for Anfield, Liverpool FC's home stadium.

Logged into his work computer, an unknown civil servant posted the words “This is a ***hole” on the page. His status as a government employee was confirmed by the IP signature he left when making the edit.

The are just over 30 public facing IP addresses used by the GSI. They are shared by thousands of civil servants across the country to access the internet, and have been logged countless of times in edits made to Wikipedia.

Most of these changes are completely legitimate. Dozens of others spanning the last ten years are not.

Moments after his first abusive comment, the 2012 editor added: “yet nothing for the victims of the Heysel disaster” to a description of the Hillsborough memorial and “You’ll Never W*** Alone” to elsewhere on the site.

The edits were immediately flagged as possible vandalism and minutes later he revised his work. Between 2.11 and 2.15pm he amended “This is a ****hole” to “This is a field” and “You’ll never w*** alone” to “you’ll never walk again” in an apparent attempt to avoid detection by the sites moderators.

The government employee's most offensive edits were revealed among others by the Liverpool Echo on April 25, causing widespread disgust and the promise an “urgent inquiry” into the incident by the Cabinet Office.

His final post, which was not disclosed, was a joke about the stadium’s capacity. Writing about the record of attendance at Anfield, he said: “This falls far short of the records set by both Everton and Chelsea, not to mention Manchester City and even Boreham Wood.”

In the days that followed the Echo's story, the government suggested it would be impossible to find the offending employee within the vast bureaucracy of the civil service.

Meanwhile, The Telegraph was approached by Wikipediocracy, an online community concerned with the abuse of the internet, and established that civil servants had continued to post edits for weeks after the Hillsborough abuse.

On June 7, 2012, one GSI user corrected the grammar in the description of Borehamwood, a small town in Hertfordshire and the same place referenced in the the vandalism left on the Anfield page two weeks earlier.

Three minutes later, the unknown Whitehall official amended the details for a public-sector recruitment firm based in the county. This time, the civil servant left a name.

He wrote: “Adecco House is locally known as '[redacted] House'. [Redacted] was an employee of Adecco who was treated very poorly by the company. They later renamed Adecco House in his honour of service.”

The edits were discovered in May and in the weeks that followed The Telegraph and Wikipediocracy traced a number of social media accounts that linked the man’s name to the firm and to the Civil Service, where he worked as an administrative officer.

Unearthing dormant profiles, it was established that he was a London-born 24-year-old living in Liverpool engaged to a civil servant.

Pictures of the couple appeared to show them travelling to watch football games and enjoying nights out, while other profiles revealed a tendency for distasteful jokes about Merseyside.

On the Wikipedia spoof website Sickipedia, he joked about St Helens, an area near Liverpool.

In another damning piece of evidence, he tweeted the week after the Hillsborough insults were posted on Wikipedia: “Remembering all those who lost their lives at Heysel 27 years ago. Never forgotten. #JFT39.”

When approached by The Telegraph, the man’s fiancee denied any knowledge of his Wikipedia activity. He has repeatedly declined requests for comment.

The man is believed to have denied the allegations when first questioned by the Cabinet Office and was placed on “special leave” while his colleagues were interviewed and his work station analysed for evidence.

It was confirmed on Tuesday that he was eventually fired for gross misconduct.

Cabinet Office Minister France Maude said: "An individual was then subject to a formal disciplinary investigation and dismissed for gross misconduct, on the grounds of responsibility for the 2012 edits.

“Mr Oliver Duggan, the journalist who wrote the story of 25 April, passed the Cabinet Office information which he believed could identify who was responsible for some of the edits in question.

“That information has proved extremely helpful, and provided a significant investigative lead. I would like to thank him for this and for co-operating with my Department over the past weeks.”